1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of data management, and in particular, to identifying and extracting information from documents.
2. Description of the Related Art
A contract is a document that defines legally enforceable agreements between one and more parties. During the negotiation process, parties to the contract often agree to make multiple amendments or addendums, and these amendments or addendums can be stored in random formats in differing locations. In most cases, the amendments contain only the details that are to be changed with very little information from a primary contract.
Without the structured filing and tracking system of related contracts including the primary contract and the associated amendments, contracts may easily become separated. This separation means that future references to the contract could be referring to old or inconsistent data, exposing any parties not keeping track of the amendments or the addendums to a significant amount of risk of overlooking the amendments and critical information contained within them. For example, a primary contract may include a clause such as “net 30 days,” and an amendment may contain “15 days with 60% penalty.” As the number of amendments and addendums grow, identifying critical clauses and variations of the clauses in the primary contract and amendments becomes difficult.
Conventional approaches manually keep track of a primary contract and amendments. However, manually keeping track of the primary contract and amendments can be a time consuming process. Furthermore, identifying critical clauses and variations of them used in multiple documents can be unreliable due to human errors.
Accordingly, there is a lacking an automated system that identifies related contracts from a plurality of documents, and detects critical clauses in the related contracts.